DVD Review: Norwegian Wood (2010)
Cast: Rinko Kikuchi , Ken’ichi Matsuyama , Kiko Mizuhara
Director: Anh Dung Tran
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama | Romance
Official Trailer: Here
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Editor’s Notes: Norwegian Wood releases 5/15/2012 on DVD from Newvideo.
It is truly a wonder that any of us make it through our twentieth year of existence in modern western society. We’re stuck in a transition period with no real sense of self as we drift aimlessly between childhood and adulthood without enough life experiences to contextualize all of the heightened emotions that our hormone addled bodies are experiencing. Such is the case for the characters in Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood. They are lost souls on the cusp of adulthood, with the urges and means to quench their lustful thirsts, but lacking in the maturity required to find the meaning of it all. Some of us don’t manage to make it through these formative years of post-adolescent development, leaving our peers to suffer the tragic consequences of our permanent and falsely romanticized deeds. Toru Watanabe (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) is a young man stuck in these tumultuous years of post-adolescent confusion. He drifts aimlessly through life, trying to formulate that elusive “plan” that he (as we all do at that age) thinks will dictate the rest of his existence.
Norwegian Wood (based on a novel by Huruki Murakami, but I will be judging the film solely on its own merits) is a beautiful film that captures that post-adolescent turmoil with expertly crafted frames that move with a contradictory pace of frenetic urgency and hapless uncertainty. We are forced into a lackadaisical whirlwind of uncertain time and space because this is how a twenty year old perceives the world. Everything is teeming with beauty and new life and each experience holds profound significance because they are often unprecedented in our limited set of life experiences at that age. Wind blows through rolling fields of grass as young lovers engage in lustful encounters that they will pay for with small pieces of their youthful naiveté that will never be fully recovered. You are presented with more choices and decisions than ever before in the short span of your life, and you are woefully unprepared for making these choices that you falsely feel will determine the outcome of the rest of your life.
Wind blows through rolling fields of grass as young lovers engage in lustful encounters that they will pay for with small pieces of their youthful naiveté that will never be fully recovered.
Watanabe must learn life’s lessons the hard way, and make the same poor decisions that we all do at that age. He is a young man that is disaffected by the tumultuous political radicalization of youth movements in 1960’s that burn with the undying energy of youthful indignation. In a Nagisa Oshima film from the era depicted in Norwegian Wood, characters walk in willful defiance of national and radical movements. Watanabe is caught up in tidal waves of idealists, but they pass over him like high tide swelling over immobile rocks in shallow waters. He’s essentially a blank mold of a young man, filling in as a sexual avatar for boyfriends that are either dead or emotionally unavailable, but unaware of the therapeutic ways in which he is being used. He is an exposed nerve of emotional availability, and women use him to try and work through their own twenty-something issues. He carries with him a flawed chivalry as he succumbs to the same hormone-driven indiscretions as any other 19 to 20 year old, but he is earnest in his naïve proclamations of love and gives himself freely despite not having a fully formed sense of self to know exactly who it is that he is giving away. One can only hope that he learns enough from his heartbreaking experiences to formulate a clearer sense of identity so that he can protect it from exploitation in the future.
The use of music is key in Norwegian Wood, and many clues about the transient nature of Watanabe’s relationships can be found in the Beatles track of the same name (if you aren’t familiar with this track, well, I don’t think I can help you). Jonny Greenwood fills in the rest of the gaps and the drifting power of his unassuming delivery offer unheard warnings to the characters as they move through these years of confusion and heightened emotion. The soundtrack moves with the gentle yet unyielding force of the wind that blows through the leaves of trees, constantly making one aware of its unassuming presence but never demanding your full attention. The music works beautifully in its task of transporting one to those post-adolescent years while capturing the essence of the film’s 1960s setting. There are some elements in this transition phase to adulthood that transcend culture and era, and Greenwood’s atmospheric approach manages to capture those elements while maintaining an ambiance that is appropriate to the setting of the film.
The cinematography in this film is both striking and packed with subtle emotional complexity that works marvelously with the content of the film. Content and form work together in synchronistic harmony to create masterful compositions that hint at the unspoken subtext of the impermanence of all things, and even seemingly insurmountable emotional pain. It establishes a cinematic universe that is simultaneously contemplative and frenetic, where characters are secondary to the indifferent movements of nature until the imperfect passion of young love demands your attention for a short time. The movement of wind through the trees is more permanent than the fleeting promises and soft lies of young love that withers as quickly as un-watered flowers in ignored kitchen vases.
Content and form work together in synchronistic harmony to create masterful compositions that hint at the unspoken subtext of the impermanence of all things, and even seemingly insurmountable emotional pain.
Watanabe will bear lifelong scars from these formative years, and only maturity and life experiences can provide the salve needed to help lessen the damages done to his soul. These are growing pains that we all must endure in order to kick off a lifelong journey of emotional ebbs and flows. We must have our hearts broken before we can attain unselfish love later in life, we must endure the sting of the death of someone close before we can learn to appreciate life, and we must endure the sting of passing youth before we can appreciate what it was to be young. There are few periods in life that are filled with such pain and uncertainty, but Norwegian Wood has the maturity required to reflect on those periods with a sense of objectivity while maintaining a beautiful nostalgia for a time when every experience felt like a strike against the raw nerves of our unprotected and inexperienced personalities. But the most wonderful part of Norwegian Wood is that it knows that those pains are a necessary part of emotional growth. We don’t all make it out alive, but those of us that do can hopefully use those experiences to our advantage and wear the scars of our youth as hidden reminders of a life fully lived.
DVD Extras:
This elegant DVD presentation from Newvideo features a wonderfully detailed making-of documentary that showed the truly international nature of the making of the film with its Vietnamese director and Japanese cast and locations, as well as the delicate craft and passion from everyone involved. It details a particularly complex tracking shot during a location shoot where the increasing madness of Naoko is illustrated through slow and lengthy pendulum movements through the grassy hillsides as the wind offers its silent depth to the building chaos within her. The documentary is often as beautiful as the film itself because of the special care given to location selection and the excitement levels of everyone involved as they exuded passion in their respective roles in the creation of the film.
It also contains a featurette from the Venice Film Festival screening which offered little in the way of content, but showed the genuine chemistry between the three principal actors.
It is a beautiful film with an equally beautiful presentation, and Newvideo has put together a DVD that I am proud to include in my personal collection.
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